Real answer, when comparing similar quality receivers (not the bare bones base models) you will find that you should be able to make the speakers sing. Of course, some people will say that Brand X is better than Brand Y. Maybe, but then there are the cost variables... Is Brand X worth the extra money over Brand Y? Does Brand Y have what I need now, but Brand X is more "future proof"?

Pretty much any of the mainstream receiver/amp companies allow enough tweaking and tuning of the sound to make them all fairly comparable.

THX certification, torodial transformers, somepoeople beleive that the receivered weight is a indication of its prowess. I remember looking at headroom figures at one point or if the wattage doubles when going from 8 to 4 ohm loads.

However, none of this is any indication of how good the speakers will sound in the end. Sigh...I could AB the whole range to hear which one I like the best.

i have krell amps that are rated for 500W @4ohms.. with a Krell processor...

Do my axioms "sound" better because of the brand of electronics that i have... nope, not really.. I use to have Marantz, then had NAD and now have the Krell gear... There was no hugely noticeable difference in sound quality.. The only reason i have the amps that i do now is because i needed more power and can run balanced inputs, my 135W per channel marantz mm9000 was being driven into clipping region during some movies... with the Krell i did notice other improvements though..

If you are buying a reciever, i would buy on the options you feel are more important. The M22's don't need large amounts of power. Any of the major brands will have no problem powering your speakers.

Pretty much all Solid state amplifiers will "sound" the same, wether they are inside a receiver or not, the only real difference is the amount of power the amp can supply.

I remember looking at headroom figures at one point or if the wattage doubles when going from 8 to 4 ohm loads.

This is only true if the amp is designed to operate at 4 ohms. otherwise it will be maybe 70% more power or somewhere around there... not 100% more power...

Call axiom and ask what the minimum impedance of the m22's is. They don't have an impedance graph posted for the m22's... If the 22's don't go below 6ohms then no worries... With the M80's they have a drop to 3ohms at the lower end of the frequency range. i would guess the 22's would have a similar drop, but only by 1 or so ohms, not a reduction in impedance by half... still a ways away from 4ohms...

Andre, welcome. Although the internet makes valuable audio information available, some discussions turn into a quagmire of misinformation. From your opening comments it seems as if you may have read something rather fanciful. The ideal of amplifier design is "a straight wire with gain", i.e., it makes the incoming voltage strong enough to drive a speaker, but adds absolutely no distortion or other unwanted effects. This ideal is impossible to achieve fully, but for many years it's been known how to design amplifiers at relatively low cost which have audibly flat frequency response and inaudibly low noise and distortion when operated within their power limits. Nothing more is possible, regardless of cost.

Although some discussions rather naively assign a "house" sound character to various makes(e.g., Yamaha is "bright", Marantz is "warm"), any engineer at a major manufacturer who came up with a unit that had an audible coloration would probably be immediately fired for gross incompetence.

We're in control of those features of receivers which do in fact change the sound, e.g., volume controls, tone controls, room equalization, etc., but the basic amplification process is audibly transparent. Buy a receiver on the basis of features and price, but there's no need to worry about an inherent "sound quality".